Installing Skype 4.3 (Latest Release) on Arch Linux

Skype is a most popular VoIP – Voice over IP – free application was released on 18th June 2014 with an upgraded version (i.e. Skype-4.3.0.37) for Linux.

Install Skype in Arch Linux

What brings new in this version of Skype for Linux:

An enhanced User Interface.

A New cloud-based Group Chat exposure.

Improved support for file transfer using on multiple device the same time.

Support for PulseAudio 3.0 and 4.0.

ALSA sound system is no more supported without PulseAudio.

Many bug fixes.

This tutorial will show you how to install latest version of Skype on Arch Linux with PulseAudio support, since Skype team announced that they discharged support for direct ALSA and this version will only work if you’ve PulseAudio 3.0 or higher version installed on your system.

Install Skype 4.3 on Arch Linux

1. The upgrade process of Skype on Arch resembles with the Skype on Gentoo Linux. Before installing Skype 4.3 on Arch Linux, assure that you have PulseAudio and all the required libraries installed on your system using the following commands.

6. Now reboot your system and open Skype and you should see the last version running on your Arch Linux.

Skype 4.3 Login Screen

About Skype 4.3

7. To revert changes to official Arch repository Skype run the following commands.

$ sudo pacman -R skype
$ sudo pacman -S skype

If you want to install Skype 4.3 on other Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and OpenSuse visit Skype official page and grab the binary especially build and packaged for those distributions by Skype developers.

Why would any one want to use pulseaudio. there are many problems with pulseaudio. It is a failure in that it is supposed to be simple and “black-box” but its not – I always have to dig in some configuration to make it work. It is also a failure in that it is supposed to simplify things, but it also makes it complicated; because it tries to guess what you want, is very intrusive, and when you change configurations it often doesn’t know what to do. Lastly, it is painfully slow by design. It resamples every single audio “manually”. You literally have to choose between quick resampling or a good resampling. If you like to do anything computationally intensive while listening to music, give up. You can’t. That’s pulseaudio.